ORH_wxman

I bet the condos in Newry are buried.

Tip and I used to muse about how there’s a physical/plausible mechanism to get that area buried under 5-6 feet of snow (not sure 12 feet is plausible like on that pic)….but the return rate is prob like once every 500 or 1000 years…who knows the actual number. We saw a little preview in Feb 2015 for Boston when depths got around 40-50 inches (and even just south of Boston in 1996)…the snows in 1717 maybe were similar to 2015…possible they were a little higher but the records aren’t robust enough to say for certain. At some point it will happen but we have no idea of it happens in 10 years, 100 years, 1000 years or we wait until the next ice age in 5000 years or whatever. I think in a Holocene type climate it is plausible but just extremely rare.

And then 3 days later

No that was back in 2005 IIRC...I think it was the 12/16/05 ice storm.

That was only like a month after the epic ORH ice storm in Dec '08

EPS seems like 2/6 better than 2/4-5.....2/6 would have been from that shortwave that Tip was discussing that was on the heals of the 2/4 event on the OP run.

Yeah I don't hate that signal....it's precarious (what isn't this year).....but it could produce a nice little event if we track it right. EPS cluster looks half-decent

Euro might get home with that 2/4-5 shortwave. I’d still watch 2/1 a bit though. There’s been hints for that one. Don’t think it would be a huge event but could produce overrunning snows.

What is CHH or GYX? Pretty sure to the east of the mountains we've gotten colder than -30

We actually had a decent shower mixed with snow just go through.

Yeah I know...but it was still interesting that we had colder 850s in some previous cold shots but didn't quite get as cold in the lower levels as 2016...the core of that cold was centered around 925 I think....I remember we were tracking the top of Stratton and they got down to like -35F

Delayed but not denied

A bunch of orchards around here got bad damage from that cold shot. PArticularly the peach trees.

There was more than that on the ground....we had a decent event on 2/8 and it stayed cold until the arctic shot on Vday. I actually still had a bunch OTG too from the 2/5 event as well. We did get those squalls a couple days before too, but they were on top of existing snowpack IIRC.

I'm all-in on the OP GFS massive NAO block near the end of the run.

Yeah a large majority of our cold records are from this type of delivery....for the reasons you stated. Typically the mid-atlantic and places further west will get their best cold shots from down through the lakes (partly because they are too far southwest to get the more northerly delivery), but ours do much better when coming out of that Ottawa/Montreal corridor.

When was the last time we saw -40C 850 temps make it into New England? Jan 2004? The Feb 2016 cold shot was actually a bit more low-level and 850 temps were "merely" in the -33C to -35C range.

That is a ridiculous cold shot on the GFS....hopefully we have bare ground for it.

Yeah, that was insane...I had like 14" but it all fell in like 4-5 hours, lol. EWB to PYM had kind of gotten screwed in the previous two events, so they started playing catchup there....and they got some good events after that when we finally started coming back to earth.

Yep, sometimes you just catch all the breaks....and that was what happened during that period. The pattern was definitely awesome, but we could replicate that longwave pattern again 100 times and prob not get as much as we did. Though the funyn part is we actually did narrowly miss a bit more too....I recall 1/31 a few days after the blizzard, we lost a storm east that hammered Eastport. But it was briefly giving us like 6-10" on model guidance.

The coop had 30.5....their largest of all time beating out 1888 by half an inch.

Yeah I was really skeptical that it was even possible to beat out February 1934...that month was so crazy anomalous, yet we somehow beat it over 70 years later....that's pretty insane. ORH also broke their coldest J/F/M combo by over a full degree. We paid the piper though later that year in December.

The Ginxy-ORH band was crazy awesome.